Pumpkin spice. It’s a phrase that has become the bane of my existence each fall. Walk in to any grocery store, and you’ll see the phrase plastered on everything from cookies to coffee to candles to even sausage. The disgusting flavor is infesting every corner of your local grocery store in the autumn, and the breakfast aisle, already infested by pumpkin spice Pop Tarts and pumpkin spice oatmeal, is getting hit with one more pumpkin spice variety this year. Pumpkin Spice Cheerios are coming, and General Mills has gone too damn far.
According to a report from Bloomberg, General Mills is adding the flavor to, of course, appeal to millennials in an attempt to boost declining sales.
General Mills is counting on pumpkin spice and other innovations to help reverse five years of declining sales. Though the family of products are still the best-selling cereals in the U.S., they were hit hard by a shift away from the breakfast food — especially among millennials. Sales of regular Cheerios, a 75-year-old brand, have slipped 18 percent since 2010.
Here’s the thing about pumpkin spice crap – it’s everywhere in the fall. It’s not as if this is a trend that just started picking up last autumn – pumpkin spice has been “a thing” for years. If someone wants a pumpkin spice flavored food item for breakfast, they’re not going to look at Cheerios and think “finally!” Pumpkin spice yogurt, English muffins, and granola all exists, which is why this addition doesn’t seem like it’s going to move the bar all that much.
General Mills and Kellogg Co. have both updated their products to cope with shifting tastes, but the days of cold cereal dominating breakfast in the U.S. are probably over, said Ken Shea, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Fast food’s push into breakfast and the emergence of snack bars and Greek yogurt as viable morning meal options have eroded cereal’s appeal, he said.
“It goes beyond the supermarket — breakfast in general has gotten intensely competitive,” Shea said.
If someone doesn’t eat cereal for breakfast and prefers another type of food item, they’re not going make the switch to cereal just because Pumpkin Spice Cheerios exist. That being said, General Mills will likely take sales away from competing cereals with the pumpkin spice flavor, but I wouldn’t exactly expect it to be a game changer over the six or eight weeks that Pumpkin Spice Cheerios are hanging out on shelves.
However, I think my favorite part of this is General Mills thinking they’re actually breaking new ground here. No! You’re not! Pumpkin spice is like a virus that nothing can destroy. If you’re producing a pumpkin spice variety of your product, you’re only contributing to the sickness. Stop doing that – if anyone wants something that tastes like cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice (and not like pumpkin at all), they have plenty of options. Every food item on the market doesn’t need to have an orange label plastered on it each September.
